The Royal Ballet celebrated Easter with an elegiac triple bill, starting in a memorial garden and ending with a sacrifice. The opening work, Tombeaux, is David Bintley's tribute to Frederick Ashton, whose ballet to Elgar's Enigma Variations is the evening's nostalgic centrepiece.

When Bintley created Tombeaux in 1993, he was also bidding farewell to the Royal Ballet, wondering where his future lay. It could be read as his rite of passage from regret to hope; the ballet ends in an apotheosis, gloomy foliage lifted away to reveal a luminous horizon.

Jasper Conran designed the sombre set and gorgeous tutus, black velvet bodices flaring over midnight blue underskirts. The women resemble a cluster of pansies, with the darkest one (Alina Cojocaru or Lauren Cuthbertson) at their heart. Ballerina and muse, she consoles the leading man (Johan Kobborg or Federico Bonelli). He upends her over his back in a vertiginous lift that is twice repeated, in case you couldn't at first believe your eyes.

Unpredictable, she yields to him in their tender pas de deux, but stakes out her territory boldly in her solos. Cuthbertson's grave radiance comes and goes; Cojocaru has the assured glamour of a ballerina with perfect faith in her own skill and that of her partner.

Kobborg serves her elegantly and gives his role a coherence Bonelli lacks. The hero veers from mournful to puckish, in thrall to the volatile moods of the music, Walton's Variations on a Theme by Hindemith. Bintley isn't as adroit as Ashton in making music and dance appear indissolubly linked: Tombeaux never quite delivers its poignant promise.

Signature Ashton steps that Bintley quotes emerge in Enigma Variations, each musical portrait brought to life in an Edwardian garden. While the women are Chekhovian, most of the moustachioed men are tiresome Gilbert and Sullivan eccentrics. Their busyness, however, provides a foil for the golden core of the ballet, when Elgar, his wife, and his friend and publisher, August Jaeger, move quietly together to the Nimrod variation.

Their restraint conveys a world of unspoken feelings, unrequited longings. Like Betjeman, Ashton was a poet of English sentiment. He could also descend into doggerel, ending his ballet with a telegram and a country-house snapshot, sweetly sepia. A programme note has to explain what everyone is so gratified about.

The pagan sacrifice that concludes Stravinsky's Rite of Spring is inevitable from the moment its implacable clamour sounds from the pit. The Russian guest conductor, Mikhail Agrest, is now in his element, even though the spring on stage occurs in the southern hemisphere. Sidney Nolan designed Kenneth MacMillan's Rite in 1962, placing aboriginal handprints on the dancers' bodytights and scarring the set with song-lines. A tree of life (or a mushroom cloud) dominates the backdrop in the final scene. On the desert floor, the tribe plays out the patterns that determine the Chosen Maiden's fate.

She colludes in her death, subsuming the collective will. There's a sensual ecstasy in her writhing, even though she's racked by fear. Tamara Rojo brings a terrible intensity to her self-selection; Zenaida Yanowsky is more impersonal, compelled by the tribe's pounding. Both accounts are magnificent, ending the evening with a gut-wrenching paroxysm.

Easter Delirium! was the enticing title under which Rennie Harris's Legends of Hip Hop appeared at the South Bank. The ragbag show sets out to tell the story of street dancing, mixing American pioneers, hot young dance crews and show-off London DJs. The history bits on video are garbled, the mainly male star turns inventively articulate. Let's admit it: hip hop is a guy thing. Girls don't have the strength for the really eye-popping moves - and that's what the audience comes for.